Maiden , William , 1768-1845 , surgeon

William Maiden was born in Strood, Kent in 1768. He was apprenticed to Joseph Coventry Lowdell for £100 in 1783. He received his medical education at St Thomas's Hospital and qualified as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1790. At St Thomas's he was a pupil of Sir Astley Cooper. Maiden travelled to Paris where he continued his medical studies in c 1790. He returned in 1792 and succeeded the practice of Mr English at Stratford in Essex. Maiden was the surgeon who treated Mr Thomas Tipple, a gentleman who had received a severe chest injury through being impaled by the shaft of a chaise, in 1812. Mr Tipple recovered and lived for a further 10 years. Maiden published the details of the case due to the disbelief from the medical profession that a patient could survive such an injury. After Mr Tipple's death, his widow requested the body to be examined. The post-mortem was carried out by Sir William Blizard, William Clift, Harkness, and J W K Parkinson. The anterior wall of the chest of Mr Tipple and the shaft itself were presented to the Royal College of Surgeons Museum by William Maiden in 1823. They were destroyed by enemy action in May 1941. He died in 1845.